Articles on Asia Pacific Executives leaving and the U.S. CCO's departure.
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/ibm-two-top-officials-quit-appoints-sandip-patel-as-md-of-india-and-south-asia/article30511043.ece
https://www.holmesreport.com/latest/article/ray-day-exits-ibm-after-two-years
Leave it to IBM to go the "open" route which nobody ends up using in the end.
@7dar SPOT ON. Why would a client want RHOS when they can have fully managed environments in AWS/Azure that are easy to use, cheap, low maintenance, and you can easily get staff to support it because everyone in IT wants to be AWS/Azure certified. Clients don’t want “open” because open=hard to maintain!
"Cloud or bust is appropriate. IBM is all in on that."
If by all in on that you mean pushing RHOS on every customer so that they can keep workloads that would have otherwise gone to AWS/Azure/GCP on-premise and calling it hybrid cloud, then yeah they're all in on that.
Cloud or bust is appropriate. IBM is all in on that. The real question is are we going to get a new leadership team who understands the marketplace. The current management team has failed. (sub 2% growth is failure). IBM board. If you are betting the company on cloud, you need to change the leadership or we are doomed to failure. The current leadership team came from the Gerstner era. That business model is gone. Time to modernize IBM and that means waving goodbye to Ginni and her cohorts
Cloud or bust. Watson or bust. Analytics or bust. All IBM does is bust. Why would Red Hat be different?
Well if Red Hat ends up being run like bloated GTS is run then it's game over.
Even that Gross Margin number looks wonky. People need to understand that Red Hat is not a software company, they are a services company, they make their money selling support contracts, kind of like GTS except a little more modern.
5vhv. All services whether IBM or anyone else take costs out as soon as the contract is signed. IBM’s trouble is GTS is “known” as a VERY low margin business that is shrinking at 4-7% a year. GBS has 2x the margin of GTS, and is flat to growing slightly. Two very different business models
@4zgx all of Services is low margin, regardless of specialty, due to the bloat from too many people B10+ and huge India delivery teams who sit idle. Every deal I’ve seen signed has started in the red, even for $100K consulting projects! sad!
You are correct I was using “gross margins” You are using net margins
https://investors.redhat.com/financial-information/key-ratios
@12UTrfz1-3gcd "Redhat has figured out how to sell 4 billion a year at 85% margins"
Your math is way off. In 2018, Red Hat did $434M in Net Income on $3.4B in Revenue. That's a margin of 12.8%.
I just put my exit notice in!!! see ya IBM!!!
You need to pay attention to the adjectives. IBM only wants to exit the low margin pieces of the services business. It actually is low margin pieces of all of the divisions. If you are associated with Cloud, AI, LINUX, or blockchain in any iteration independent of margin, you get a “get out of jail free card” as these are the golden children for now. High margin pieces of the business no matter where their focus is at, also get the get of jail free card. Everything else (approx 1/3 of all IBM heads) are in the spinoff cross hairs
If the plan is to exit the business in Services, why still hold us to quotas and allow hiring tickets? Legacy contracts are struggling due to poor quality resources. Let the contracts die already.
@4xsq,
I heard IBM never demotes salaries. Even if you get thrown into a lower band your salary remains.
"Sorry GTS but you don’t fit into the going forward strategy"
GTS-GBS are married now remember, so include a sorry for woeful GBS as well.
You say “Redhat SW is terrible”. That may be true, BUT Redhat has figured out how to sell 4 billion a year at 85% margins. IBM liked that financial equation and got their checkbook out and wrote a 34 billion dollar check. Like it or not, IBM has made their play, and it’s Redhat first, Redhat middle, and Redhat last. The strategy is Redhat going forward due to large margins. IBM legacy if it has large margins, will be fine. You can’t fight the tide. Redhat has won the mind and soul of IBM exec’s. If you are working on the best thing since sliced bread, but it has low margins, you most likely are going to get spunoff. In the words of the borg. You will be assimilated.
Jealousy around Redhat is astounding. Ironically almost all Redhatters didn’t wanted to do anything with IBM.
Red Hat's software is horrible.
To the folks who asked is it Redhat or bust. Here is the answer
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4316290-ibm-setting-up-well-for-new-investors
IBM has laid all of their cards on the table. 1100 top customers worldwide, pay down debt quickly, exit low margin businesses, focus on GROWING REDHAT no matter what. Sorry GTS but you don’t fit into the going forward strategy (cloud guys you get a lifeline).
I’m a female with real technical skills and honestly I don’t know how these women make it in the organization. I constantly have to deal with extreme s-xism and jealousy from Indian male colleagues which has escalated publicly several times. So again this is another facade by IBM management to make it seem like there’s a diverse company when in reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth. But what can you expect, management is so far disconnected from reality that they have no clue what’s really going on, nor do they care.
Guess Big Blew is sticking with the trend of pushing females to higher positions.
For completeness' sake:
Harriet Green exits as IBM chief in Asia Pacific –
https://www.reseller.co.nz/article/670121/harriet-green-exits-ibm-chief-asia-pacific/
IBM names new Asia Pacific leader –
https://sg.channelasia.tech/article/670144/ibm-names-new-asia-pacific-leader/
It’s redhat or bust! IBM has pushed all of their chips toward the middle of the table, with one very very important caveat IBM isn’t going to make the Softlayer mistake, and instead will appoint JIm as the new CEO for IBM. So if there is a blow up of IBM, it will be on the legacy side of the house, and not on the Redhat side of the house. Expect some rather large changes in management and services as 1st q moves along. IBM will refocus with what Redhat knows best. Services (outsourcing) isn’t part of that and will be deemphasized. Legacy, middleware, and traditional IBM endeavors are quite safe, as IBM’s primary mission is to make money and they do make money. IBM is not exiting money maker endeavors, BUT they will exit low margin businesses quickly as they have to stop the bleed and taking bad news early as a new CEO is expected. New CEO’s always get a “get out of jail free card” to implement their change in strategy. It’s going to be a major change for approx 50% of IBM
Red Hat or bust huh? That will turn out like Softlayer or bust did. Nada for IBM
Chq. All things Redhat means that Redhat is IBM’s customer facing strategy. It’s IBM’s new branding. That doesn’t mean that IBM will nuke all of the middle ware. Instead IBM will milk the middle ware For the billions of dollars it makes. (whats the definition of a legacy SW. one that works). This play book is exactly the same as the mainframe play in the past. (How often have we heard that mainframe is dead). Redhat is the new strategy, like it or not. Milk the legacy, but push Redhat as IBM’s face to the public
Harriet Green gone... good riddance!
says Harriet green has also left - well never really sure why IBM took her on. had no idea about technology, and was an embarrassment when you saw here on TV trying to talk tech
“Everything Red Hat”, what does that really mean? Aside RHEL and OpenShift, Red Hat reliés not sh– open source products, none that can compete with similar IBM products which by the way are making Billions for the company. So give me a break!!!
I just can’t wait when the Red Hat (former) CEO becomes IBM CEO and he sells the likes of MQ, IIB (ACE), WAS, the mainframe just to rely on his c-ap open source software... that will be the real end of IBM!!
Note these are being forced due to lack of performance. There will be more. There is a new strategy (everything Redhat). Folks are being told, “get on board or leave”